Learning, Practice Effects, and Usability Testing Results

In the days before a user comes into a lab for testing, users have been posting to Facebook, adding to a conversation on Twitter, and learning a new game to play with their kids. They have been practicing the same tasks that they will use in testing. These practice effects change the way users understand the interface, use the interface, and report their satisfaction. But, practice effects do not change all users and not all users bring the same amount of practice. In this talk, I will discuss how to measure practice effects and why this changes usability and development.

You will learn:

How users generalize with experience.

What types of experiences lead to generalization

Why this causes differences in users which results in differences in usability testing.

A quantifiable measure to predict which users are most likely to find usability problems.